This week, the world gasped in awe at the raw heroism of Jean Rohe, the student at the New School who gave a speech attacking the commencement speaker, Republican Sen. John McCain, at the commencement ceremony.

We mostly heard about Rohe's bravery from Rohe – and, really, who is in a better position to judge? As Rohe herself put it: "If there's one thing that I know about myself, it is that I care for people, and in that sense I have a great deal of character."

According to her posted biography, Rohe "grew up singing and performing folk music with her family. Jean spent a year at Smith College followed by a summer at the Universidad de la Habana in Cuba on scholarship where she honed her Spanish skills, learned about Cuban history, culture and politics, and made some of her dearest friends" – mostly while waiting in line for hours and hours each day to get toilet paper.

In other words, Rohe is just a typical all-American girl, right down to a stint in Castro's Cuba.

In an unintentionally ironic article about her brave decision to attack the commencement speaker, Rohe describes going around campus the day before her speech and discovering how overwhelmingly popular it would be to attack McCain. At two graduation ceremonies a day earlier, attacks on McCain brought wild cheers from the audience.

See, where I come from, sucking up to the audience is not called "courageous." It's called "toadying."

Every place Rohe went that day she ran into students and faculty fashioning armbands and preparing their protests. As she said: "The situation seemed pretty serious."

Literally every person Rohe talked to the day before the ceremony opposed the war in Iraq and hated McCain with blind fury. Her mother – the one who tortured the children by making them sing folk songs – wept when Rohe read her illiterate speech over the phone.

Rohe's resolve to tell the audience what it wanted to hear, guaranteeing wild standing ovations for herself, was only hardened when she was told there would be media at the event.

While some might say it was gutless to suck up to the audience by insulting an invited guest, they didn't understand the incredible risks Rohe was taking by attacking a Republican at the New School: You'll be a pariah in the West Village! You'll never sing in a jazz club on the Lower East Side again! And don't even think about setting foot on the Upper West Side!

As Rohe later said: "It was something I didn't want to do, but knew I had to out of an obligation to my own values" – which happened to be the exact same values as the entire audience, the faculty, her fellow students, her boyfriend and her mother, each of whom shared the value of being rude to an invited guest who also happened to be a Republican, a U.S. senator and decorated war hero.

And so Rohe attacked McCain's speech before he delivered it, with such devastating ripostes as this:

"Sen. McCain will tell us that we, those of us who are Americans, 'have nothing to fear from each other.' I agree strongly with this, but I take it one step further. We have nothing to fear from anyone on this living planet."

Such as, for example, Osama bin Laden – and that's according to Rohe, who is furious with Bush for not having caught him yet. Isn't Osama a person "on this living planet"? Does she think we have something to fear from him?

I'm sorry to be a snob, but this trusting view of terrorists is hard enough to take from smart liberals. When I have to hear the New School version of it, my eyeballs have rolled not only out of their sockets but out of the building.

Maybe in her heart of hearts, Rohe does think Bush is an imbecile, McCain a lout, and the war is wrong. Maybe she would think so even if she had ever met someone who holds a different opinion.

But then she should just admit: "I know, I know. I'm an utterly conventional brown-noser, the very definition of going-with-the-flow, middle-of-the pack, finger-to-the-wind follower, who doesn't have the candlepower to resist conforming to the beliefs of everyone around me – but that's what I think."

If you want to find the cool, anti-establishment rebels who don't answer to "The Man" on college campuses today, you have to go to a meeting of the College Republicans. They are rebelling against at least 99 percent of their professors. Even the original '60s anti-war protesters were rebelling against at least 5 percent of their professors. Today's college liberals ape the beliefs of 99 percent of their professors and then pretend they're on-the-edge radicals.

We've always had to endure goody two-shoes apple-polishers – kids with their hands always up, who turn in talkers when the teacher leaves the classroom and volunteer for extra work after school. But not until today's college liberals have we ever had to suffer the effrontery of the ass-kissers telling us: "I'm bad – I clean erasers for teachers after class because I'm baaad."

I don't care what liberals think. I don't care that they're spineless suck-ups. Just don't insult my intelligence by telling me they're brave.

More on this little snot by Linda Chavez in today's Phila. Inquirer...

What a spoiled kid owes McCain

A commencement protester speaks of honor, but she doesn't understand the concept.

By Linda Chavez

It's amazing what passes for courage these days.

The newest hero in the left's pantheon is 21-year-old Jean Sara Rohe, who gave a self-indulgent little tirade against Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) on Friday when he spoke at graduation ceremonies for the New School in New York.

Rohe no doubt thought she was speaking truth to power when she said, "The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," but what she really demonstrated was appalling conceit.

You can agree or disagree with McCain's politics, but the man is one of the few genuine heroes in public life. Although the official biography on his Web site doesn't even mention it, John McCain spent five-and-a-half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp after his plane was shot down in 1967. He suffered terrible injuries, which were not properly treated, and was beaten and tortured repeatedly. He refused early release, choosing to stay with his fellow captives until all came home together in 1973. He has spent his entire life in public service ever since, first continuing his career as a Navy officer and then as an elected official.

Rohe could have chosen to give a substantive speech detailing why she believes "preemptive war is dangerous and wrong" - or as she so categorically put it, how she "knows" that it is. Instead, she took the easy way out by insulting the speaker and throwing out some leftist chestnuts about the still missing Osama bin Laden and weapons of mass destruction. But the former would have required her to grapple with ideas; she chose to take potshots.

Rohe has now decided to explain her decision to forgo a speech she'd written for the occasion, one that would have talked about music and her work with children in the New York City public schools. In a posting to Arianna Huffington's blog, Rohe writes, "A certain not-so-dynamic duo of 'centrist' politicians foiled my standard graduation speech and forced me to act. Until just the day before commencement I really hadn't understood the gravity of the situation," she writes (www.huffingtonpost.com).

Meeting up with some students who planned to protest the speech, she got this brilliant idea: "I checked the schedule for the ceremony and realized that I would be speaking just before the senator got his award. And that's when the idea for a preemptive strike began to brew in my little stressed-out brain. What if I tore McCain's speech apart before he even opened his mouth? After reading his speech a couple of times I picked out a few particularly loathsome sections - and believe it or not, none of these actually came from the extensive section where he defends his position on the war in Iraq - and I began planning an attack against him using his own words."

Just before the moment finally arrived, Rohe found herself in the green room with McCain. She introduced herself, "I almost wanted to warn the guy that I was about to make him look like an idiot so that he would at least have a fighting chance and an extra moment to change his speech to save himself. But he didn't even make eye contact when we shook hands, so I figured I didn't owe him anything."

She couldn't be more wrong. She and the others who jeered not just McCain but the president of their university, former senator and fellow decorated Vietnam veteran Bob Kerrey, owe them their very way of life. Men like McCain and Kerrey have endured more than Rohe and her fellow protesters can even imagine so that all of us might enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Rohe said the commencement was "an occasion that is supposed to honor us above all." Maybe that's the problem. McCain was addressing a bunch of spoiled kids who think they deserve "honor" for having made it through college.

I hear that... Liberalism and political correctness have become the establishment, and we (college-age conservatives) have become the underground, anti-establishment culture glorified in the '60s.

Very true. All the words are backwards now.

Today's "liberals" are are devoted to protecting the establishment, opposed to free speech, in favor of racial discrimination, and in favor of the socialist staus quo that uses government force to take money from the people and give it to themselves. They're more accurately called conservative, reactionary, racist, greedy elites.

Today's "conservatives" are anti-establishment radicals devoted to free speech and racial equality, who want economic fairness and prosperity for all through capitalism.

I was, sorry to say, a sixties radical. Many if not most of my friends got old and turned into establishment "liberals". I'm still a rebel and reject most all of their views, which I grew out of decades ago.

Right on young conservatives and viva la (Reagan) revolucion!

Amen, Annie! I know people who are like-minded politically who don't like Ann because they say she's too extreme and writes such outrageous things (how is she any different from Maher and Olberman, e.g. whom I loathe). But I like the fact that she has the guts to skewer morons on the left and she backs it up by appearing on the polticial indoctrination centers that pass for universities. These idiots who preach to their amen corners and claim to be courageous make my blood boil. I was perusing a magazine last night at the store that had an article on Green Day, and the quote on the cover said "We aren't afraid to criticize America." Gee, wow, what guts and how original! Inside, beneath the picture of the deep thinking Billy Joe (you know he's serious because he has that mussy hair and black eyeliner) another quote read "We're rock and roll terrorists!" What rebels, how daring! What a bunch of simple-minded shite.

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